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Europe Seen Leading the Way in Hand-Held Computing

Six-year-old Maria shows how to learn Spanish on a mobile phone to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, right, and then-Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, left, at a technology fair in Hanover, Germany, in 2010.

—Focke Strangmann/AP-File

By Ian Quillen

While hand-held mobile learning is viewed in the United States as a recent trend, its roots go further back in the United Kingdom and Western Europe.

As early as 2001, David Whyley began directing national government funding toward hand-held computing devices for students as the head teacher of a school in the Midlands of England.

And by 2006, John Traxler, a professor of mobile learning not far from Mr. Whyley, at the University of Wolverhampton, was speaking to an audience at Microsoft Corp.'s headquarters in Redmond, Wash., about the educational possibilities of hand-held devices such as cellphones and personal digital assistants, only to be shrugged off by an audience that instead saw laptops and the ubiquitous wireless Internet—and not 3G and 4G networks—as...